Mary Gentle Read Online Free Page A

Marie de Medici said, her voice a whisper in the stinking, butcher’s-shop obscurity of the inn room. “You have the hours of darkness to arrange this. Now go.”
    On the way out I dropped back from her men and visited the jakes—much to their amusement—and in the necessary-house slipped a livre and a verbal message to the pot-boy, telling him to run straight to the Duc at the Arsenal after the courtiers had left.
    I made my way from the Les Halles district, furiously thinking. Two more of her faction met me as I did so, making signs that a blind and deaf man would have noticed, and it was plain that I must make some stab at looking conspiratorial while waiting for my message to be acknowledged.
    I had no option but to find a man who immediately came to mind—since I had been gathering evidence on him before I made it a matter of an arrest—and have a clandestine conversation in his lodgings. And now they would be watching him, also.
    The night went on. I could discover no way through the cordon of the Queen’s agents. No word came to me from the Arsenal.
    What is happening at the Duc’s household? Has Maignan been missed? Is there a paid spy, a servant, a killer, even now in the same room with my master Sully?
    Time. Time . If I had more than these few hours; if she didn’t want it done tomorrow!
    And that is not wit, on her part. She doesn’t do this because she knows it leaves me too little time to act. She does it because she’s drunk on today’s ceremony, because she has just been crowned queen, and she’s too impatient to wait a minute longer to have her husband murdered.
    By the time I was shadowed back to my lodgings, I had reached a towering fury. Two separate attempts to leave secretly, in the early hours, failed. On the second, when I set out plainly to walk to the Arsenal, one of the Queen’s hired men accosted me. He said smilingly that he would not let M. Rochefort’s temper rob the Duc of his life, and I put my sword through the upper part of his lung.
    That led his dozen or so followers to escort me at a distance back to my street, where I found the pot-boy, half-senseless and bleeding, on the steps of the house.
    “She gives you this one chance,” one of the departing courtiers said: a short man with a Florentine accent. “No more messages. Do as you are told.”
    I sent the boy limping away with another two livres, and stamped upstairs to kick Gabriel awake to make me mulled wine, and sit scowling by the light of one candle.
    Wit must sometimes stand amazed before foolishness. On the face of it, an attempt to turn her enemy’s chief agent, and in person—the stupidity! If she is being manipulated by one or other of the King’s enemies and she leaves proof, there is a scandal to satisfy even
Spain
.
    But she can deny it, knowing the worst that may happen to a queen is exile to some provincial château for a year or two.
    And if she were to succeed in turning me, what does she get out of it? A husband dead, good: she is then Queen Regent on behalf of her boy-Prince, Louis. Or else Sully compromised completely, because his man has attempted to kill the King. Also good: a most powerful enemy obliterated. She must think she can’t lose.
    But it will fail, I concluded then, in the early hours—and now, coming back to the morning sunlight and Gabriel flinching from my backhanded blow.
    Because I have arranged it so . I have no intention of killing King Henri! This will fail as the other sixty-odd attempts have. And as it does, then I can warn Sully, in the confusion, that the Medici has an agent in his house.
    Something in me still insisted that Gabriel Santon be got out of the way.
    If I’m seen or arrested, or—body of God!— caught, while apparently setting up an assassination, they’ll put my servant to the question.
    I picked Gabriel Santon up off the floor by the neck of his linen shirt, dragged him to the door, and hauled him through it.
    “Messire!” he protested, gasping and